Terrible Tony - Tony Coelho, VP Al Gore's presidential campaign manager

National Review, June 14, 1999 by Jay Nordlinger

In 1965, Coelho went to Washington to work for his congressman; 13 years later, he succeeded him. His rise in the House was spectacular. After a single term, he was elected chairman of the campaign committee, formerly a snoozy, decorous entity, which Coelho turned into a juggernaut. His modus operandi was to say to the nation's businesses, Look: We, the Democrats, are going to be in control for the foreseeable future, so fork it over, or suffer the legislative consequences. Coelho was, as Chris Matthews puts it, "the ramrod" of the House Democrats, enforcing party unity and beating back what was known as the Reagan revolution.

And all the while, he delighted in taking after Reagan, positively savaging him. He seemed to live for, as he liked to say, "putting a few scratches" on the "Teflon president." If Coelho did not invent the term "sleaze factor"-a reference to the number of Reagan-administration officials accused of ethical wrongdoing-he did as much as anyone to peddle the notion. And he railed incessantly against Reagan's strategy of arming the Nicaraguan contras against the ruling Sandinistas. Reagan and his men "don't want peace," he declared. "They don't want democracy. They want the contras in charge . . . because that's what the right wing wants." To Coelho, the conflict in Nicaragua was simply "the Reagan war."

George Bush, he liked slightly better. He saw the Gipper's successor as someone "who wears cowboy boots over argyle socks" (a rather neat description of the Bush persona, actually). At the 1988 convention, he proclaimed, "The history of the Reagan-Bush defense policy can be written with a toilet seat in one hand and a subpoena in the other."

The next year, however, Coelho's luck ran out: He was hoist by his own ethical problems, prominently one involving an audacious loan from an S&L crony, used to invest in a junk bond. He was also one of the most shameless check bouncers in a rambunctiously check-bouncing Congress. Coelho, unlike his close ally Speaker Jim Wright, skipped town a few steps ahead of the law, not waiting for the Ethics Committee to disgrace him. He explained on MacNeil-Lehrer, "I understand politics, and I understand what the Republicans would do with [the situation]. Nothing negative about that. I happen to like partisan politics."

More than landing on his feet, Coelho became a managing director of Wertheim Schroder & Co. He also joined more corporate boards than Gerald Ford can shake a stick at. But, naturally, he didn't quite purge politics from his system. In 1990, in a nice instance of foreshadowing, he told National Journal, "I would be interested in managing a presidential campaign if I had the time." In 1994, when his party faced disaster at the polls, he was called in as a "senior advisor" to the Democratic National Committee. His job, again, was to be "the hit man," as he had once exulted. But in '94, it was Coelho and the Democrats who were hit, losing their majority in the House for the first time in 40 years.